Help

Newsletter

Rising tide could swamp First Coast, Florida, members of Congress say

Members of Congress visited Jacksonville’s Southbank Thursday to warn about the harmful potential of rising sea levels.

“Along the Florida coast, there are places with nine to 10 inches of sea-level rise already,” U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., told reporters before he joined Florida Democrats U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown on a boat tour of the city’s waterfront.

“The science is beyond debate, and truly the oceans don’t lie,” said Whitehouse, who has spent the week at spots along the Southeastern coast publicizing effects of changes in ocean levels. He said Floridians have a disproportionate stake in sea-level changes, he said, because the state accounts for a huge share of all the homes vulnerable to inundation when water levels change.

“If the sea level rises, it starts pushing into the freshwater in the limestone honeycomb,” said Nelson, who this month chaired a hearing in Miami Beach on sea-level rise. “The water sources we now depend on are turning salty.”

But Nelson carefully distinguished between his warnings and concerns of some environmental advocates that deepening the St. Johns River’s shipping channel could increase salt levels in aquifers by allowing more salinity within the river.

The lawmakers had talked with administrators for the Army Corps of Engineers office on the Southbank just before

“Two different subjects,” Nelson told reporters, adding the factors going into climate change impacts and the river deepening are “separate and distinct.”

Not so, St. Johns Riverkeeper Lisa Rinaman said as she waited to board the boat with the lawmakers and members of garden clubs that Whitehouse praised for being attuned to environmental changes.

“You can’t separate the two,” She said. “Instead of making this river more vulnerable to sea-level rise as a result of the dredging, figure out a way to mitigate [the effects]. … They can’t have those two conversations in a silo, because they are directly connected.”

Brown, who has vigorously backed the river deepening, said she’s counting on oversight by the Corps of Engineers to consider the environmental costs of the river construction, and weigh that against the benefits that could come from port expansion.

“It’s always about balance,” she said. “We want to do the economic development. We want to do jobs. But we want to leave this environment for the future of the earth, because we have only one earth.”